Merita boasted its own lobby, a miniature version of its Elitus counterpart. The architectural features and decorative trim were all on a slightly smaller, finer scale, and the color palette was softer, paler. The guard on the door was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, matronly of dress and demeanor. Her austere, slightly hard face melted only fractionally as I approached, but her careful bow was respectful.
“Lady Misrai, I presume,” she said. “I shall announce you. Gentlemen,” she remarked, eyeing Namud pointedly, “are not permitted within the confines of the club.”
Namud caught my eye, but his nod of acknowledgment was formally polite, and he turned on his heel as if he had expected no less. As he walked away, I felt once more that momentary panic, as if I was high on a chimney stack and had just unclipped the carabiner of a safety rope. I half turned toward his retreating back, but the door was open, and my name rang out from the mouth of the rather dour housekeeper, if that was what she was.
The room, like the foyer, was smaller than its equivalent in Elitus, more like a drawing room, with walls of deep mauve set off by bright white trim and molding. The furniture, all restrained elegance and soft curves, was old-fashioned, formal, and less comfortable-looking than what the men had. The effect was like a gilded frame that had been designed to complement the image within, though in this case the painting was the ladies of Merita artfully perched on the various chairs and love seats.
There were eight of them. Three were only a few years my senior, four were nearer forty than thirty, and one was at least sixty. They were, of course, all white and made more so through what I took to be a well-managed regimen of lead or arsenic cosmetics, which left them ivory pale, their skin translucent and bluish like watered milk. They wore fashionable evening gowns with short sleeves, low necklines, and voluminous skirts buoyed up on crinolines. They rose with a rustle of expensive fabrics—one of the middle-aged ladies wobbling on heels high and narrow as railroad spikes—and turned their eyes on me. They were cautious, appraising eyes, eyes keen to determine my interest value, my worth to them.
Or so it felt. What was really going through their minds I could not guess, but I was used to being invisible, ignored, and this sudden scrutiny made me feel like a butterfly in a jam jar, albeit one with golden wings. They took in my dress with eager fascination. The eldest lady seemed to linger on my exposed navel and her eyebrows arched fractionally, as if she had steeled herself against the shock of Istilian attire but it had proved too much for her after all. In a moment she would have to sit down, overcome by all that brown skin open to the air.
I clenched my teeth, then ceremoniously lowered my veil and gave my practiced aristocratic smile. Where the gentlemen of Elitus had been effusive and titillated in their hurry to greet me, the ladies of Merita were subdued, cautious even, and several seemed to be standing on their dignity, so that I wondered how many of them had objected to my being invited. They stood, smiling politely rather than warmly, extending gloved hands, and murmuring their names as if I really ought to already know who they were.
Except one. She was, I suspected, the youngest of the group, a fresh-faced, blue-eyed doll of a girl with blond ringlets spilling with sheer exuberance out of her demure cap. Her eyes were as wide as her smile when she took my hand—the first to do so, as she had been the first to her feet as I was announced—and while the others merely offered their names like diners passing the salt, she opened her mouth and the person she was spilled out in a rush of delighted glee.
“Lady Ki! Such a pleasure to meet you,” she gushed. “Can I call you Lady Ki? Or should I call you Lady Misrai? I’m not terribly good at etiquette when it comes to foreign dignitaries, but I mean well. Do tell us all bout your journey! I just can’t wait to hear all about your travels and about Istilia. It must be so beautiful! I want to go there so much, but Father won’t let me. Not till I’m twenty-five, he says, which I think is absolute rot, don’t you?”
It was like standing beneath a waterfall.
“Your father…?” I inserted.
“Oh, what a clodpoll I am!” she said. “I’m Lady Alice Welborne. But you can call me Alice. Everyone does.”
“No, Lady Alice, they don’t,” said the next woman, another pale-skinned beauty who might have been twenty-four, twenty-five, but who had an aura of wry-amusement in her gray eyes.
“Well, Constance, I ask them to,” said Alice, “and that amounts to the same thing.”
“Oh do stop talking, you silly girl,” said the elderly, lace-veiled matron, pushing her way into the conversation like a haughty tug on the river. “I’m afraid, you must forgive our more exuberant member, Lady Misrai. Doesn’t have the brains God gave a sparrow, bless her. But she does, as she says, mean well. I am Serafina Dearbeloved. My husband, as I’m sure you know, is MP for Skevington East.”
“Is he in the Brevard party?” I asked, settling into the gracefully designed armchair and doing my best not to sit on the pleats of my sari. The Merita ladies followed suit.
“I should think not,” exclaimed Mrs. Dearbeloved, a large, opulent woman who—at least in this moment—gave the impression of just having eaten a considerable meal which rendered her bloated and disinclined to movement. Her eyes swiveled as she spoke, but the rest of her might have been held to her chair with a number of well positioned straps. “Brevard party, indeed! Reginald is a cabinet minister! A member of the National party, the ruling party of the city-state of Bar-Selehm. One would think a foreign dignitary would know such things. I’m afraid that the Brevard party are really not our kind of people at all,” she added with a chuckle at the others, which rippled around the group like the chittering of Madame Nahreem’s hyenas.
“Why is that?” I asked innocently.
“Yes, Mrs. Dearbeloved,” said Lady Alice, her brow puckered with confusion as if the question had never occurred to her before, “why is that?”
“Because the Brevard party would hand the country over to the blacks in a heartbeat!” declared Mrs. Dearbeloved, still moving nothing but her eyes and lips as if someone was performing a species of surgery on her spine. “Not that they will ever be elected into power,” she added, calming. “Thank God.”
“You lean more to Mr. Richter’s party,” I said.
I sensed the unease around me, but Mrs. Dearbeloved seemed oblivious to it.
“Well, he’s hardly of the noblesse,” she said, musingly, “and it is widely thought that the practicality of his policies would require more than can be currently spent, but he has some very sound ideas.”
“Segregation by color,” I said.
“It’s really not so very different from what we have now,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved loftily, “but I wouldn’t expect an outsider like yourself to understand. You don’t have our problems.”
“Because her country is not ruled by people who conquered it, you mean?” said one of the younger women, who had introduced herself as Violet Farthingale. She was a slight, pretty thing in an ordinary sort of way, with a mass of chestnut curls and a shapely bosom. She had smiled as she asked the question, but there was steel inside the velvet, and it stung the older woman in the high-heeled shoes like a dagger fly.
“Don’t speak about things you don’t understand, girl,” the woman who had introduced herself as Agatha Markeson snapped. She was, I thought, surely the wife of the blustery fellow I had just met in Elitus. She had a shrewd, pointed face which had the curious effect of looking permanently startled and accusatory, as if she had just interrupted you pilfering her jewelry box. “Mr. Richter is merely pointing out that we were best to follow nature in such matters. The lion does not befriend the antelope.”
“And which are we?” asked the younger woman.
“I beg your pardon?” demanded Agatha Markeson.
“The white people,” said Violet, sweetly. “Are we the lion or the antelope?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Agatha. “You know how dangerous the city has become. A respectable lady can barely cro
ss the street in safety.”
I thought her emphasis curious, and said, “So the Mahweni are the lions?”
Agatha gave a just-as-you-say nod, lips pursed, but Violet said, “We must be a remarkable species of antelope to have entirely subjugated a race of lions and confiscated all their territory.”
It took all Madame Nahreem’s mask work for me to show no flicker of amusement and surprise, and in my head I suddenly saw Mnenga grinning broadly, that unrestrained delight of his, which—
“The past is past,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved returning to the conversation with a flick of one finger which, given her immobility to this point, was as potent as if she had leapt onto the table and bellowed, thereby rendering three centuries irrelevant. “We must now look to stabilizing the future.”
I wondered if that was a phrase her husband had used in Parliament.
“Which the Brevard party could not accomplish?” I inquired.
“Well, they have their sympathizers,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved. “The various Mahweni tribes,” she said, disliking the word, “though they, of course, can’t vote.”
I saw the flash of annoyance in Violet Farthingale’s eyes, though she said nothing.
“But the city blacks can participate in elections?” I asked, my tone neutral.
“Oh yes,” she said. “They can’t run for office themselves, of course. That would hardly be appropriate. Yet they can vote for the candidate of their choice like everyone else.”
“Well, perhaps not like everyone else,” said the woman who Alice had called Constance. As before, her tone was amused, as if she alone had noticed something funny, and her gray eyes flickered with intelligence. I had thought her beautiful, but she had none of Alice’s girlish softness or Violet’s furvor, and her beauty—“handsomeness” was perhaps a better word—might have looked better on a statue placed somewhere high up, a feature that reminded me a little of Dahria. I gave her a puzzled look, and she explained her remark. “The city’s black voters can only vote in certain districts.”
“It’s more than fair,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved.
“No doubt, Serafina,” said Constance, “but while the city’s white districts have several government seats allocated per few thousand residents—and some seats are elected by only a few hundred voters—black districts such as Morgessa, Nbeki, and Old Town have only one seat per ten thousand voters. The result is that even when the Mahweni are of one mind—”
“Which hardly ever happens,” inserted Mrs. Dearbeloved dismissively.
“Their votes cannot have a meaningful effect on the election,” Constance concluded. She spoke with that same dry amusement as before, and the effect was disorienting. The point she was making suggested outrage at a palpable, if time-honored, injustice, and I saw as much in Violet Farthingale’s face, but Constance delivered it with such ironic detachment that she seemed not to care at all. It occurred to me that she was merely needling Mrs. Dearbeloved for her own private amusement and, feeling like I had been made a pawn in whatever socially acceptable spitefulness was in play, I felt stung.
“Isn’t that rather appalling?” I asked, still sweet, still sedate, but only just. “That so many people have no practical voice in their own governance strikes me as deeply unjust.”
“Well, as an outsider,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved—and there was that trace of distaste again as she looked me up and down, “you can’t be expected to understand, but it is, I assure you, a kindness. Better that those who can govern do so. As we say here in the city, we don’t look to the infant to plan its own breakfast.”
More knowing smiles, which I attempted to match.
“On these matters,” she added, “I think Mr. Richter very sound, and I would like to see the Nationals adopt something closer to his position. Indeed, a merger of the two parties might prove most fruitful for the city, perhaps even under his leadership. Tavestock is a decent enough prime minister, but Richter speaks the truth without worrying about what is popular or whom he might offend. We need that kind of integrity.”
“If you are concerned about unequal representation,” added Constance, “I might add that no one in this room can vote at all, so black men have one better on us.”
“Oh, please don’t start on that women’s suffrage business again, my dear,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved. “It is quite tedious.”
Constance smiled her private smile, and her eyes lingered on mine.
“Tedious it may be,” said Violet Farthingale stiffly, “but until Bar-Selehm allows women—”
“I wouldn’t want to vote,” Lady Alice interrupted guilelessly. “I can’t abide politics. It is so terribly boring, and it never has anything to do with me. If I was given the vote, I’m sure I’d choose the gentleman who wore the nicest hat or—”
“Perhaps you might vote for a lady like yourself,” asked Constance. More needling.
Lady Alice’s doelike eyes got wider still.
“A lady MP!” she gasped. “Now I think you are teasing me, Constance. You really shouldn’t.”
“That is very true,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved. “I suggest we change the subject before our visitor concludes that we have no conversation at all. Agatha, tell us about that glorious shawl. It is quite becoming.”
I couldn’t tell if she was still irritated with Constance or at something else entirely, but her compliment to Mrs. Markeson seemed somewhat halfhearted. The woman in question—whose last contribution to the debate had been to spar with Violet Farthingale over lions and antelopes—was perhaps next in age to Mrs. Dearbeloved, and she wore a royal stillness like an achievement. Her shawl, it had to be admitted, was indeed lovely. It was draped around her shoulders over a conventional, even old-fashioned, dress. The color of the shawl—a misty gray, almost silver—was not especially out of the ordinary, but the fabric itself was astonishingly fine, even compared to my own lustrous silk. It hung with such softness about her that the slightest movement stirred it, so that in brightness and texture, it seemed almost liquid, and looking at it was like beholding moonlight on water.
Despite her queenly demeanor, it was clear that Agatha Markeson had been waiting for this very moment, and though she affected a politely self-deferential tone as she showed off the shawl, she was delighted by the attention.
“It is rather special, isn’t it?” she said. “And it complements these shoes so nicely.” The shoes in question were the ones with the three-inch dagger-point heels usually worn by women half her age. They looked absurd and lethal, and though I could shin up a two-hundred-foot chimney without batting an eye, those dizzying heights would have been beyond me. “I take no credit, of course, but I am proud to be, I believe, the first to wear so remarkable a cloth.”
There was something in her manner that was more than snobbery or smugness—a hint, perhaps of defiance, even of anger, which I did not understand. She pointedly did not look at anyone in the room, but I felt a shuffling of attention, an awkwardness like embarrassment, and when one of the ladies rose abruptly, I felt that the rest avoided her eyes.
Violet Farthingale was pink in the face.
“Excuse me, ladies,” she said, not looking at them. “I believe I need a little air or a lie down.”
No one said anything, and as the door closed behind her hurried exit, the uneasiness in the room seemed to deepen for all but Agatha Markeson, who inflated a little. There was color in her cheeks, and the glitter in her eyes looked oddly like triumph.
“What is the shawl made of?” I asked to fill the silence.
“I like to call it Bar-Selehm silk,” said Agatha Markeson with feigned indifference that could not conceal her glee, “though I think that rather sells it short, don’t you? Forms of the material have been around for a long time, and the western tribesmen used to weave a version of it for their ceremonies. Not like this, naturally, but using the same basic material. It was always quite heavy and coarse, but this has a considerably finer thread. Of course, with these new child labor laws, it is frankly astounding that
anyone is able to produce anything, but the best in the city have always risen to a challenge, as I think this material demonstrates. You might expect it to be very fragile, but it is remarkably strong. I can’t tell you where I got it, but I’m sure you will be able to find its equal in the shops eventually.”
As the other ladies purred their resentful admiration, my gaze fell on Constance, who rolled her eyes fractionally, so that I grinned back before I could stop myself. The momentary breach in my performance of the aloof Istilian princess shook me, and I took hold of myself, determined to make all this subterfuge worth the trouble. I had not, after all, come here to listen to society women prattle about their dresses.
“Whatever happened to that charming Mr. Sandringham?” asked Mrs. Dearbeloved, changing the subject. “I haven’t seen him all week.”
Alice looked guilessly at Constance, and though she looked quickly away again, the damage was apparently done, and Constance was forced—against her wishes, I would say—to reply.
“Ephraim has left the city,” she remarked. “On business. I do not know when he will return.”
“That is a shame,” remarked Mrs. Dearbeloved with exquisite venom. “So sad when young couples cannot find ways to resolve their personal lives. But never mind, my dear. You have several good years in you yet, and I’m sure someone will find you most beguiling.”
Constance’s face clouded, and she gritted her teeth but managed to smile broadly.
“I’m quite sure Constance knows her own mind,” said Alice, “and that pity is not called for.”
It was a gallant attempt to stand up for someone she clearly admired, but Constance’s irritation seemed to increase. I cleared my throat delicately.
“I was surprised to find that Elitus and Merita shared the same house,” I remarked, reemphasizing the Istilian lilt. “I even met some of the gentlemen members just down the hallway.”
“Oh?” said Mrs. Dearbeloved. “Which ones?”
Firebrand Page 12
